AF Healthy Eating LLC (AFHE) is currently engaged in the business of consulting and holding seminars for Not-for-Profit, Charitable, Educational and Public institutions to improve their food service menus. AFHE typically addresses topics that make menus have the most variety and value and at the same time remaining conscious of Nutrition, Allergy or Special Medical Dietary needs.
The manager of AFHE has asked Silver Team for a solution where AFHE can reach a wider audience that will benefit from their seminars and menu consulting, and also enhance the delivery of services as it pertains to their magazine subscriptions.
Silver Team has proposed that AFHE begin by having a highly informational website that will market and showcase their services and company values to retain current customers and attract new ones. Silver Team has also suggested publishing their existing magazine online, focusing on advertising their current services to a wider audience and allowing it to be orderable and readable on the web. Customers may subscribe to either the hardcopy or online version through the proposed site.
AFHE currently offers third-party advertising in its hardcopy magazine and will continue to reap ad revenues in its web version. In addition, existing seminars can be recorded and/or webcasted.
As a second phase, Silver has proposed building and giving customers access to an online knowledge base grouped by the topics AFHE typically consult and speak.
Currently there are only offline revenue channels, which are the magazine, and consulting and seminars held. They rely greatly on word of mouth. In the future these will work with our proposed online channels by making the magazine be offered in both online and offline formats.
There will also be the online channel that will be advertising the business, and of course the future knowledge base. But the online and offline channels work together by mirroring each other and making the offerings and advertisements available to a wider audience which will increase revenue.
Although the market for individuals to access nutritional and diet advice is somewhat widespread, Silver Team has found it is limited for institutional food programs. The competitors found were:
As mentioned above, existing customers will be leveraged into the solution.
Additionally, the solution will be marketed to:
Rationale for using Internet Solutions
Increase customer base: Nutrition awareness for institutional food service programs is increasing. As mentioned in Prevention Magazine, nutrition is crucial for children in their youngest years to sustain healthy food habits now and into their adulthood (http://www.preventioninstitute.org/growing.html)
AFHE really sells information. This information can be made available on the World Wide Web through internet marketing methods by registering with search facilities such as Google, Yahoo and MSN but also popular search engines in the nutritional field (i.e. The American Dietetic Association and www.usda.gov
Retain existing customers: AFHE has no way of keeping constant contact with current customers. Registering them as mentioned in Business Model section will allow AFHE to ‘keep up’ with customers by creating an online database indexed with their typical topics of interest. This way, as magazine and seminar content is available, applicable customers are targeted with content they are interested in.
The above solution is targeted for Phase 1. Future phases include building and maintaining a Knowledge Base and buying affiliate merchandise and/or making links available to purchase merchandise